the market for meth in america is nearly as old as industrialization. poor and working-class americans had been consuming the drug since the 1930s whether it was marketed as men si green, meth green or o bead run for the simple reason that meth makes you feel good and permit you to work hard. thanks to the brothers and lori arnold, these same people no longer needed to rely on expensive prescriptions and were able to get a stronger form of meth at a much better price. this at a time when the drug's effects were arguably more useful than ever. so, too, did meth become more widely available at exactly the moment that rural economies collapsed and people left. under those circumstances, those who remained felt they needed the drug most. by 1987 if you wanted meth and you lived in southern iowa or in northern missouri, you went to the bar that lori arnold now owned, the wild side. there the increasingly beleaguered ottumwa police whose numbers were shrinking alongside county and city tax revenues had little chance of interrupting lori's profitable crank bus